středa 21. září 2016

Release 7.0 and The Vision

I would like to officially welcome you to 2016 autumn/fall (depending where you are). The days are getting shorter and the weather is becoming more moody. Fortunately, there are even good and exciting news. The number 7 in the PerfCake version number is not only lucky. It also introduces 57 total enhancements and 17 bug fixes. We spent extraordinary efforts on bringing the best performance testing tool we could to you. Feel free to download now!

Except for code enhancements, we also completed our guides (Users' Guide and Developers' Guide) to carry the best up-to-date information. In addition to this, we realized that, first, performance testing is not an easy job and there aren't too many resources on how to do that properly, and second, some scenarios in PerfCake that can be especially powerful aren't very obvious on first sight. To overcome these difficulties, we started writing two books on LeanPub. First is Performance Engineering and the second is PerfCake: Performance Testing Scenarios. The first one will ask you to contribute a small amount of money to support our work, the second one is and will be for free forever, however, small contributions will be gratefully appreciated.

I would like to use this opportunity to also introduce you to our vision of future of performance testing and what we do to make it happen. For a long time, we know that we suffered in the area of development of performance test scenarios for PerfCake. No matter how powerful the XML is, we need something more visually appealing. Currently, an IDE plugin is under development that will bring you not just a scenario editor but also a debugging tool. You will be able to use the new debugging facility in PerfCake and monitor an actual test execution.

Regarding runtime, we would like to work more in a way of performance testing as a service. Users could use a Web UI to connect their favorite cloud environment (e.g. EC2, Azul, GCE, OpenStack...) and use the machines in the cloud as agents to run the performance scenario in a cluster determining geographical locations and other attributes.

The results would be then stored in a PerfRepo which is already a part of our portfolio. The PerfRepo is undergoing a rework to cover more common use cases in fewer clicks and be more user friendly. Also the integration between PerfCake and PerfRepo will be more seamless and automated. The results will be stored for later examination, comparison between various runs, and reporting. Again as part of our Web UI suite.

Regarding the PerfCake core, we are not aiming at any "shake the world" changes for spring release. Unless there is any demand on specific features, we will cover the issues currently open on Github and concentrate more on the books, documentation, video blogs and viral marketing in general. The development efforts will be spent more on the supporting tooling.

Just for curiosity, the code name of this release is Raspberry Moon according to a full moon we had a chance to see while thinking about the code name. It was a beautiful full moon low on the horizon and it had a nice red-pink (like raspberries) color.